Gov Capital Investor Blog

What is GDPR?

After the questionable usage of personal information by several websites and application, most notable Facebook data breach, there was an appeal to regulate the information technology industry. The answer first came from the European Union legislators as the form of GDPR, which was intended to make websites more wary about their activity concerning their users’ privacy. Let’s take a closer look what the buzz is all about.

GDPR basically gives users more control over what they want to share with a third party and makes the rules clear for users and service providers as well within the European Union. Personal information is understood as anything relating to a person’s private, public or professional life.

All the rules included in the regulation protects users from unintended data sharing but does not restrict it. For example all the data sharing options must be at the highest privacy option at default but can be changed by users at any time. Also the collected data can be tracked down and followed more easily now and if the user parts with the service they have the right to be forgotten. In other words they can can lawfully claim that their data be deleted.

The companies who do not comply with the new rules get first a warning as it happened with a lot of enterprises at the beginning of introduction. Further sanctions involve a fine of 10 million euro or 2% of revenue, whichever is greater. In case of more serious mishandling the fine can shoot up to twice as much.

The introduction of the new regulation gave rise to much discussion and controversy. At a couple of cases the regulation does not cover perfectly all the various scenarios where users interact with services. Other than that the full adoption of the regulation is going to take time and money to build the necessary infrastructure. Because of these necessary investments, the regulation could make it impossible to the smaller players to stay in the game and make the giant corporations’ like Facebook’s and Google’s place rock solid despite the fact that it was intended to hold them back and make the field a little bit more even.

There is also concern about the blockchain technology’s future in the era of GDPR because it contradicts with the very foundation of the technology, namely the fully transparent record keeping.

All in all the general opinion about the regulation that we move to the right direction. Exploiting aggressively user data any further would probably hurt the whole industry in the long term.